Until now, most of the things you could make with a 3D printer were the sort of items you didn’t really need. After all, you can only have so many scale models of spaceships and Raspberry Pi cases. A designer from New Zealand by the name of Simon Ellison has just taken 3D printing to a new place entirely. He printed a desktop computer speaker in only 9 hours.

The speaker is made of multiple materials, but it seamlessly flows together. You can’t do this kind of multi-materials printing with standard 3D printers though. Ellison used an Objet500 Connex Multi-Material 3D printer from Stratasys. This is a very high-end professional 3D printer that costs upwards of $250,000.

With access to this super-printer, Ellison was able to build the speaker cone and driver in one go with flexible materials. After the 9 hour print, it then took 3 hours to carefully strip away the support materials and get the speaker ready for use.

There are obviously some metallic components in a speaker, and even the Objet500 Connex can’t print metal… yet. The only parts of this speaker not printed are the magnet, the coil, the cable, and the glass housing. A housing could have been 3D printed even on a consumer-grade device like the Makerbot 2. Glass was only used so the internal components of the speaker could be seen.

The end result is a surprisingly elegant mono speaker. No word on how it sounds, or how durable it is. Although it does work, and that’s a start. You can think of this as a peek into the future of home 3D printing. This technology won’t always cost a quarter of a million dollars.